


Destiny's End

by ms_cris



Category: Roswell (TV)
Genre: Dark, Gen, Post-Graduation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 06:39:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9422831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ms_cris/pseuds/ms_cris
Summary: Rewind. Reset. Go.[Re-post from 2004.]





	

_Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one’s slightest distraction. - “The South,” Jorge Luis Borges_

The attacks came suddenly.

Although in retrospect, in truth, perhaps not so suddenly, not suddenly at all.

Among the rotting filth of his prison cell, he knew that he had been in love, once. He knew that he had been happy, warm, and safe. Once. He had known the caress of warm sunshine like lemon tang, the slap of the brisk air like a bright buzz, the tease of a woman’s hand—body—against his skin. Once. He had not spent the entirety of his life here.

He. had. not.

But, all he had known was gone now, torn away like a dream in the harsh light of day.

Where had all those faces, all those feelings, all those certainties gone?

It had all gone for her, everything for her, every dream for her.

I knew it was over for us soon after we’d left our small dusty, desert town. We were at a cheap truck-stop motel in another no account town, an unremarkable pit stop on our ceaseless journey across this country to be forgotten as soon as we left like everything else we'd thrown away in our childish arrogance. Another nameless piece of God's country and nothing more than that, but that motel had been more than that for me.

That pit stop had been the beginning of the end.

I was lying next to my wife on a cheap mattress. We had been married for little over two weeks, and this kind of unfettered closeness was new to us. Despite the lack in décor, I can still remember the low hum of excitement that coursed through my body as I lay near her with only a trembling line of space separating us. The knowledge that I could swallow up that space between us and be with her, that she was mine had thrilled me to the depths of my soul.

I can only laugh at my selfish, innocent romanticism now because I also remember how later, much later that joy, like all my joy, had been leeched from my life drop by drop. After you witness the agonizing destruction of everyone and everything you ever knew, everything just kind of grates especially the touch of a woman whose endlessly dark eyes were never less than accusing and suspicious.

I had been about to reach my hand over to touch her, to touch my precious Liz, when the vision hit me.

The images came in flashes, disjointed but clear enough. Blue eyes, almost obscured by black liner, wide with terror. A scream roughly cut off by large hands. The same hands buried in bubble gum pink and blonde hair. A loud, unnatural crack echoing into the night. A petite body sprawled out in an alleyway. A man crouching over the body with a glowing hand. Five marks in the shape of a V, my seal but not mine, burned into her right cheek.

I was never one for premonitions. I left that to Michael and Isabel, but I didn't need them to decipher what I had seen in my vision. She didn't move. She was dead, like her sister. I saw her die, like her sister.

I may have decided to forget Antar, but Antar had not decided to forget me.

The small of his back burned with the pain of holding his body erect. He was grateful for the sensation. His pain was the only thing he had which still anchored him to this world. Pain was the only thing that told him that he still actually lived holding on however wretchedly to existence.

He was past feeling his knees or his hunger or much of anything. Once, he knew that he would’ve happily murdered a man for the room to sit and rest his body, which had bothered him to know at the time (although not enough to make the fact untrue), but now he found that comfort did not matter.

Nothing mattered but this concentration of straining nerves.

Everything that had ever matter to him had crumbled away to nothingness and he was determined that this would not follow to nothingness either. He would hold his pain. He would have pain as his to hold to his last breath.

Maria was the first to die. Large with child and too slow, she couldn't move fast enough to dodge the deadly blasts of energy that flew between our two factions. She was running from the sturdy, ranch house that had been her home for the past two peaceful years as best she could with Michael practically carrying her along when suddenly she stumbled and was thrown forward by a blast hitting her from behind. Michael caught her not letting her hit the ground; never letting her hit the ground but it was too late.

She was still, too still.

Isabel was at the wheel of the van, which the gang thought I kept for nostalgia, and Liz was in front too trying to blast a path clear while Kyle worked on watching our back, but I was at the door. I saw Michael’s face as he watched the only woman he had ever loved die right in front of him and I knew that he neither would see nor would want to see another day without her.

Gently kissing her lips, Michael turned from us and sent a wave of unbridled energy out to our enemy. I recognized the uselessness of trying to save him before I even truly thought to exit the van. Rather, I decided to take the reprieve he granted us. Michael was saving us one last time. I silently thanked him for his futile bravery then, but I don't know if I would still be so grateful to him now. Perhaps, dying together in the purity of the Montana snow would have been better than to end the way we did fractured and hollowed out. I don’t know. I don’t even know if we had a choice. Destiny can be relentless in her pursuits.

I slammed the sliding door firmly shut and ordered Isabel to go. Isabel balked at my command, unwilling to leave Michael and Maria behind, but I would not take no for an answer. I jolted the van forward with a burst of power and we fled from our ranch.

As we sped across the flat Montana roads, an explosion rocked the landscape. Michael had destroyed our home along with our enemies and himself. Afterward, the van was a silent tomb. The only sound that could be heard was rubber running over asphalt. This unnatural hush continued until we reached our safe house, a cave I made everyone keep supplies in despite their increasing eye-rolls over my paranoia. When we reached the cave, Isabel ran out of the van while Kyle chased after her. Liz just sat in the front seat and quietly cried. I reached over to touch her shoulder in a gesture of comfort, but when my hand made contact with her body, she stiffened and turned toward me. She knew. Liz could always see straight through me.

Tears still streaming down her face, I saw utter hatred in her gaze and I was thrown back in time. Suddenly, I was eighteen standing in my mourning clothes in Alex Whitman’s room facing Liz’s accusations, facing the fact that I was responsible for the death of her best friend. I withdrew my hand and exited the van without a word. She had every right to blame me. I had let this happen.

I was the king, and I had betrayed my people.

The tenuous line between reality and illusion was receding for him.

He could no longer tell truth from lie. Had he ever?

Time lost its hold.

He lived lifetimes in seconds cataloguing the movements of his breath. The only constant was the pain in his back.

The only reality was pain.

Liz died on an afternoon in September several years later. By this time the Antarian forces didn’t even bother to hide their presence from the human population anymore, and so Earth had become an open war zone with human life extinguishing by the thousands every day. Kyle and Isabel left us to return to Roswell to try to hold back the destruction of our home and our families but I didn't see the use in going there. Besides, after Montana, they could no longer look at me without seeing that night and I knew that they needed to escape that memory and me, so I let them go without us.

Liz stayed with me. I think she might have understood the futility of trying to save that corner of the universe, but I don’t know. She might have felt anything. She might have felt that she had chosen me, so she deserved the isolating consequences of that choice. She might have felt she couldn’t face learning the fate of her parents or the people that she had loved as a child. I don’t know. Liz and I didn’t talk about the past or the future or anything not pertaining to the immediate needs of the moment that we inhabited anymore. There had been a deafening silence not just in words but in connection since the night she realized that I had known this invasion would happen and had done nothing about it.

A bullet killed Liz.

Conscious of conserving energy, when engaging an enemy that could be taken down by earthly means, Khivar’s forces used earthly means. This gut shot was a slow death. She lingered for hours bleeding to death in the ruins of an abandoned church on the outskirts of a nameless town that we’d been passing by from one resistance base to another in the ceaseless effort to provide as much information as possible to the human resistance. Liz insisted that we do our share to fight when we’d been found and lost by our enemies. I wanted to save her but I burnt out my powers defending us as we narrowly escaped the increasing forces. There was nothing I could do but watch her grow cold and pale until there was noting left of her but the lifeless shell of her body.

Her last moments revealed the truth of her love for me. For hours we had sat in the tiny wooden church. Liz was no fool. Pressing the tattered remains of her shirt to her stomach, she knew the extent of her injury. She did not complain or cry but only lay at the foot of the pulpit silently keeping her own thoughts as her life drained away. I positioned myself close to her but not touching, unsure if she would want my touch after everything that had transpired these past years. Finally, despite my arrogance and hope, she was revealed to be just another one of my failures.

She surprised me. She took my hand into hers and asked me to look at her. She was tired, dirty, bloody and deathly pale but the dark look of accusation was for once gone from her eyes. I don't have the poetry needed in me to describe love. Any words I could use would undoubtedly fall short of the truth so I will only say that in her last moments she looked at me with love, pure and shining, and spoke her heart.

“If I had it to do over again, Max,” her voice was barely above a whisper but I felt the strength and honesty ringing in her tone, “I would still give my life for you…but I wouldn't give the lives of my friends. Not even for you, for this.”

Those were her last words to me, to anyone in this world.

He no longer slept.

He knew to sleep would be to dream, and he had lost all his dreams one by one in the preceding centuries.

He feared a dreamless sleep -- a sleep without sensation, without pain.

He knew to lose the pain that had come to dominate his universe would be to lose himself.

He feared the loss of himself. The threat of infinite oblivion was the scathing flames of recrimination that licked his consciousness and kept him from slumber.

I always that thought if Liz died, then I would die too. I would just curl up and just stop without her; but as I had been many times in my life, I was wrong. I went on without her. I walked, I talked, I ran, I commanded without her by my side. The ease with which I put the past behind me was a disconcerting truth to learn about myself but my discomfort did not make my ability to move forward untrue.

I had left behind many in my short half-human life. Nothing was served by looking backwards at them. My choices had been made several years ago in my youth, and now I was just playing to a foregone conclusion. Destiny would have her way.

My end came in Arizona.

I did not go to the Southwest often, but Isabel requested I come aid her. My sister was the last link to a mostly dead life. She and Kyle, along with their daughter, had been stationed in various bases in the southwestern area supporting the human’s against Khivar for the last four years. While I found her request strange, I did not particularly question her right to ask for my help. We were the two most powerful beings in the resistance, and she had hinted of someway to combine that power the way we did as children to regain an advantage.

Right before they took me, she told me that Khivar had murdered Kyle and was holding her little Maria hostage. There were hardly any tears involved in the scene, which was very unlike Isabel, but only a calm explanation and betrayal. Angry, I slapped her. She stumbled back from the force of the blow but did not make a move to defend herself or retaliate against me. Eyes cast down to the floor in shame, she merely nodded and apologized.

I said nothing. I had nothing to say to her. It was over.

I had known this moment would come with a certainty that I had known about very little in my life, but I still found room in my heart to be shocked by her. 

_The things which I have seen I can now see no more._

Then…there was…light? Light, sharp and piercing like the sting of a knife sliding into flesh. He had forgotten the heat of light.

He fell forward out of the coffin that had been his for a month and a millennia.

With the fall, he lost the strain on the small on his back. He lost his pain.

Panic swelled within him, it was lost. All was lost.

Then he heard a voice. Was it the voice of an angel?

He risked the light and found himself peering into a familiar set of dark eyes, full with moisture. He looked away. He did not wish to see her. She wept and her soft cries echoed down the hall until he could no longer ignore them. Yet, he could not focus on them either. It was far too late in the day for him.

The only world he recognized was mercy. What was mercy? What would she know of mercy?

It didn’t matter, he thought. The only thing that had mattered was the pain, and it was gone. He could not even hold on to pain.

But then there was that word, again. A word and a movement then pain, rich and wondrous pain. He had regained his truth but this pain was different. This pain was not low and aching but sharp, burning, in the center of his being. It was taking him. Taking him where? Taking him…

Michael was hustling me out of the Crashdown. As we slammed through the swinging doors and our feet struck the pavement, the expression on his face was frantic. Michael was never frantic. I was in shock, my ears were still ringing with the impact of that deafening sound, but I allowed myself to be pulled away by him.

A part of me wanted to go back to help her, but a larger part was warning me not to interfere in this matter. Revealing my powers that way without consulting the others was not my place. I needed to keep my promises and leave her to her destiny.

***

THE END.


End file.
